


And of these, Love is the Greatest

by zzoaozz



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Biblical References, Daddy Issues, Explicit Language, First Kiss, First Time, Good and Evil, Hurt Lucifer, Long, Love, Lucifer cursing God, M/M, Prompt Fic, Religious Discussion, Saving the World, Secret Crush, Sexual Orientation, Stolen Grace, Three graces, charity - Freeform, faith - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-10 17:17:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12916575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zzoaozz/pseuds/zzoaozz
Summary: The Bible says that when everything else is gone, these three abide, Charity, Hope, and Love and of these Love is the greatest.  Creation is in danger of extinction now that God has really gone away for good. Angels cannot reproduce, human souls are running out, and Hell cannot make more demons. Into the dying world comes those that remain, the three graces.  Wherever they go, darkness turns to light, and despair becomes joy. Heaven wants to harness their power to create new angels. Asmodeus blames them for breaking Hell. Sam, Dean, and Castiel want to save them and save creation in the process. Unfortunately for Dean, the first Aspect they find is Love and all his feeling for Castiel are magnified.  He has always considered himself straight, and reconciling what his heart wants with his own self image creates conflict that could hurt them both.  As he struggles with his crisis of orientation, Lucifer finds himself facing some cold hard facts about his relationship with his father and how it made him the epitome of evil.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I am not sure where this fiction will take us, but I have a feeling the way will be littered with pain and misunderstanding and darkness. This is not going to be the light fluffy, happily ever afters I normally write, but be patient, the destination will be worth the wait. Thank you to the wonderful people at Destiel Port on Facebook for being a sounding board and an endless source of support and encouragement. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1738066693138229/?fref=nf

“This is serious, Dean.” Castiel glared at the hunter. His normal stoic expression did not change but there was disapproval in his eyes.

“I know, Cas. I’m sorry for laughing. It’s just… You know that you are family, Man, and we love you. The rest of those feathered douchebags though, tell me why I should care if they do go extinct after the way they treated all three of us?

“He does have a point you know,” Lucifer added helpfully.

“Shut up!” Dean and Castiel shouted in unison.

Lucifer chuckled softly and leaned forward attentively, pointedly ignoring the shackles on his wrists and ankles as if they did not exist.

Sam sighed. He had been the one to insist that they could not leave Lucifer behind or just kill him without his grace and now he was seriously regretting it. “Okay, let me get this straight, angels can’t breed with each other. God made every one of them at the beginning of time and hasn’t made any more since then. So, it looks like between the fall, angels killing angels, and the whole leviathan thing, their numbers are dangerously reduced. Then in Hell, you two heard the torturers telling Asmodeus that they haven’t been able to torture any new souls into demons. But there are still plenty of demons in Hell and on Earth, right?”

“Not really.” Lucifer interjected. “It’s a bit of a tradition that when a new king takes over they clean house so to speak. Crowley was a lax king in a lot of ways, but even he took care of the loyalists when he took over. He tended to let his minions do whatever they pleased, within reason so they got used to that. Abaddon’s minions were foaming at the mouth zealots loyal only to her and they slaughtered any demon stupid enough to stick his hand out for a reward. And around and around it goes. Very few of the existing lot would be inclined to give Asmodeus the amount of attention and ass kissing that southern fried twit requires. It’s much easier to kill the old demons and make new ones than to win over their trust and loyalty unless you are powerful enough to terrify them into obeying. I can tell you right now, when I get my powers back I am going to turn the lot of them into ash.”  
  
Sam swallowed at the absolute lack of emotion in the simple statement. Lucifer had ridden him long enough for him to know when the devil was stating a fact.

“Good riddance, maybe do the same to yourself afterwards, “Dean snapped back.

“And miss personally breaking your soul when the reapers send you back downstairs? Oh, I don’t think so, Deano.”

“He is not going back to Hell, not ever. I won’t let that happen.” Castiel’s voice had dropped to a deeper pitch but tripled in volume, the way it did when he was being the “Angel of the Lord” in his full terrifying, inhuman glory. From the way Sam and Dean started and tensed, they had forgotten again that he was not human.

Lucifer just snorted dismissively. “We’ll see little brother o'mine, we’ll see.”

“It’s not just Angels and Demons, Winchesters.” They all jumped at Billie’s voice. The current personification of Death stepped forward out of the shadows as if she had been in the bunker the whole time. “Humans are going extinct as well.”

“What the heck, Billie," Dean groused shoving his gun back in his belt after getting over the start, "is there some cosmic law against angels frickin’ knocking on the front door?”

The three angels in the room just looked at him a long, silent moment.

“Um, Billie,” Sam interrupted clearing his throat, “wh-what do you mean by that, humans going extinct, I mean?”

She sighed heavily and shifted her glare to the younger Winchester. “If you don’t already know you should, all human souls are made by God. The whole "without him was not anything made that was made" bit." Her fingers inscribed quotation marks in the air. "He created a huge number of human souls as the species began to spread and multiply, but the speed of the multiplying has been increasing exponentially for centuries with only minor setbacks from famine, disease, and war now and then. God would periodically create millions of new souls and store them in the Guf. They wait there until their human is born. When it is time they are are carried down to the waiting body by a special division of Cherubim called psychopomps.”

“Hold on just a pea pickin minute here, you’re telling me that movie about the pregnant chick had it right?” Dean scoffed.

“He means “The Seventh Sign,” Sam clarified. “According to the movies, when the last soul was used up all babies would be born dead and the Armageddon would happen.”

“Well obviously the Armageddon isn’t going to happen because certain idiots from Heaven, Hell, and Earth opened the seals prematurely and fucked up a carefully laid cosmic plan that would have completed the cycle of creation and allowed humanity to live happily ever after on a new Earth free of pain, death, earthly cares, and evil in general,” the former Reaper replied dryly, “but yes, once the Guf is empty every child conceived will die as soon as it is out of the power of its mother’s soul. Clones will die as soon as they enter the fetal stage. Your race will have at most a century until the last child grows old and dies.”

There was a somber silence after that that Castiel finally broke. “Why is Hell broken?”

“Hell is Lucifer’s baby, ask him?” Billie rolled her eyes expressively.

“I don’t know. Everything has been weird since Michael took my grace.” Lucifer sounded mildly annoyed which was as close to sincere as he got.

“Father created Hell long before you fell. He put that cage in there before any of us thought the day might come when an archangel would need to be contained.” Billie’s voice softened a little. “You don’t really think that he created his sister’s seal and set it on your arm without knowing it would corrupt you? You don’t think it was an accident that the Mark could be passed to a worthy human and there were two of them right there at Adam’s place, do you?”

“What are you implying, Reaper?” Lucifer spat as his eyes flared red even with his weakened grace.

“I’m not implying anything, Serpent. I am telling you that humans would never choose the greater good over what is easy and fast unless there was some boogeyman out there in the darkness waiting to drag them down into a lake of fire if they chose wrong. You weren’t the first thing he cared about that he sacrificed for his plan and you sure weren’t the last. The reason you were able to corrupt a soul into a demon in the first place is that he let you. He stripped away his protection from every soul he let you have. You were always part of his plan, the literal necessary Evil. Sorry if that hurts your ego.”

“Sammy,” Lucifer’s tone was one Sam had only heard a few times deep inside his head, one that terrified him to the core of his being. “Unfasten these chains now. I’ll come back later.”

By the time Dean got the first few words of his snarky retort out, Sam had unfastened the locks. Lucifer did not look back, just marched up the stairs and slammed the door on his way out.

“Why the Hell did you do that?” Dean demanded.

“Because he isn’t as stupid as you,” Billie shut him down with a dismissive flap of her hand. “You three threw everything out of whack in the first place. Fix it.”

‘How? Cas asked quietly, automatically accepting the blame for everything, the way he always did.

“I haven’t got a clue,” Billie confessed before disappearing as silently as she had come.


	2. Chapter 2

The night shook. Dean sat up in bed trying to shake off the lingering fingers of his dream. The second blast chased any thought of sleep from his mind. He rolled out of bed and jumped into his jeans then literally hit the door running. He almost collided with Sam in the hallway. The bunker was awash in flashing red lights and the siren whooped in a steady warning.  
  
“Dean, what is happening?” Castiel’s deep voice cut through the din with surprising ease.

“Some kind of alarm,” Sam answered, “look at that.” He gestured down to the library. The huge map was covered in flashing white lights, as was the top of the ancient computer system and panels set into the walls that neither of them had ever noticed before. His long legs took the stairs in two large bounds and a few strides carried him to the massive system manual that he had found bolted to the wall after the fiasco with the British Men of Letters. He ran his fingers down the index and turned to the correct page. “So get this, It looks like a massive celestial event. It says the epicenter should show as a cluster of white light that fades to yellow then red the further away it is.”  
  
“There’s white everywhere, Sammy. Does the book say what that means?” Dean punched at random buttons and twisted knobs that did nothing.

“Uh, no.” Sam shrugged and picked up an angel blade from a shelf and headed toward the door. His brother and the angel followed.  
Outside the bunker, the night was perfectly still and very dark. Low banks of clouds masked the thin sliver of moon. 

“Maybe it’s just a false…” Dean never finished his sentence because a sound like a single sustained blast on the world’s largest horn shattered the night and the ground trembled and groaned beneath them.

“Earthquake?” Sam asked hesitantly.

“No, a trumpet.” Castiel’s voice was certain and full of quiet wonder.  
  
“So, the angels are up to their shit again?” Dean muttered annoyed.  
  
“Not unless they resurrected Gabriel,” Lucifer stepped out of the shadows looking up at the sky ignoring the way all three spun around in surprise. “Only a few angels are able to blow the final trumps.”

“Final trumps, the ones in the Bible that herald the Armageddon?” Sam asked looking intently at Lucifer. 

“Well, yes and no. The human witnesses might have gotten parts of the revelation wrong because someone might have slipped them some powerful hallucinogenic.” He pursed his lips and cocked his head to one side, “but rules are rules, if no one saw it, it didn’t happen. Am I right, Sammy?”

“Don’t call me Sammy, Lucy.”  
  
Lucifer just sniffed, “Oh you can do better than that. Take your time, those old gears do turn slow.”  
  
“Come on, tell us what’s happening” Sam asked not rising to the bait.  
  
The sounding of the trumps can only happen after certain of the seals are broken, the fire, rivers of blood, the horsemen rising, etc. etc., blah blah blah blah. The first four have already sounded, back when you were trying to deny Michael and Me our preordained destiny. Anyway, the last three are special. They are sounded after the Armageddon, after the war is over but before the old Earth dies and the new one is born. They herald the coming of the final chance at salvation.”

“That sounds like a good thing,” Castiel said grimly, “so why do I not feel reassured.”  
  
Lucifer sneered, “because dear old daddy never bothered to tell the four of us what form that salvation might take or who exactly was getting saved.”

“What exactly did he say?” Sam prompted. Lucifer glared at him, but Sam was surprised to note, the devil looked rather tired and washed out.  
  
“He said that if something ever happened to him, some things would abide and in them would lie a hope for salvation. That’s all.”  
  
“Abide. Some things abide, I’ve read that somewhere before…” Sam’s thoughts were interrupted by a second blast. His eyes combed the skies looking for something. Everything grew silent as if holding its breath. Not so much as one cricket chirped and there was no trace of breeze at all. It was somehow oppressive. The third and final blast shook the Earth and Heaven. Then his mouth hung open in silent wonder as the sky lit up with chasing bolts of lightning as far as the eye could see.  
  
Jack came plunging out of the bunker gasping. The sirens were blessedly silent behind him, but the eerie red light still pulsed. He drew in a ragged breath as Castiel went to him and grasped his arms demanding to know what was wrong.  
  
“Angel radio,” he gasped. “They’re freaking out. It’s so loud. What’s happening Castiel? The singing, I’ve heard it somewhere before, but I don’t remember where.”

  


“Singing? On angel radio?” Castiel asked dubiously.  
  
“No, Father, in the sky, in the ground, everywhere! Can’t you hear it? It’s coming from the sky but the earth itself is repeating it back.” He swayed where he stood, and his eyes closed. A look of pure bliss washed over his face. “It sounds like joy.” 

“And Heaven and Earth repeat the sounding joy,” Lucifer muttered. “Damn it, Dad, what did you do?”  
  
“That’s a line from a fricking Christmas carol, Asswipe.” Dean’s face darkened in frustration, “Is Jesus coming again or something?”  
  
“Jesus was a vessel father created in a human womb and used for his own purposes. The “son” left when the “father” split.” Lucifer sighed ignoring the way everyone’s attention but his son’s focused on him in wide eyed shock. “There are other things though, things he created, things that were already here that he used.” The fallen angel looked up, “… and they call me the Prince of Lies, Daddy Dearest, fuck you and everything you created. I’ll watch it burn before I die for you.”  
  
“No, Lucifer,” Jack said softly, “you will help me save it. You don’t have to be what Grandfather made you to be any more than I have to be what you made me to be. The darkness is dying in you.”  
Lucifer’s face darkened for a moment then grew distant, his eyes cold. “Don’t think you know anything about me, boy. If you do, you’ll regret it. Turn that fucking alarm off. I’m tired.” 

Jack concentrated, his eyes glowing gold and the lights ceased. “This is a good thing, Castiel. It really is.” He sounded certain.


End file.
